One of the difficulties of having a long release cycle for a small project is that a lot of activity might be taking place behind the scenes, but a casual observer might not notice. Of course, in the case of Schrödinger, it didn’t help that diracvideo.org was lacking CSS and important links for over a month, looking rather bit rotten. So it’s not surprising that there have been people wandering into the IRC channel wondering if the project is dead. Um, no. We’re just quiet. And there’s a new release.
Partly the reason for the long release cycle is that it took more time than expected merging several of the encoding tools from dirac-research. But now there are fewer loose threads and development and releases can proceed at a more even pace. I’m hoping to do new releases at the pace of about one a month. (But I’ve said that before…)
Schrödinger now requires Orc to build. Switching from liboil to Orc has made decoding a lot faster, sometimes as much as 4 times faster.
Look forward to separate blog posts about some of the new features. Encoding quality has improved quite a bit for typical cases, and hugely in cases where there were bugs that were being ignored.